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2015 GAX Symposium: GLOBAL ASIAS | ART

Global Art and Diasporic Art in Japan and Asia

Friday, June 26 – Saturday, June 27

Symposium jointly organized by Mori Art Museum, Asian/Pacific/American Institute at NYU, and Integrated Human Sciences Program for Cultural Diversity (IHS), The University of Tokyo as part of the 2015 Global Asia/Pacific Art Exchange initiative (GAX)

This symposium is set in the background of an ongoing investigation under the rubric of Global Asias Art and Visual Cultures, which includes reflections on changing connotations of Asia, the modern and the global with its sets of networked economies and circuits of artistic production and visual flows. The symposium will continue with an evolving awareness of transcultural and transnational mobilities in relation to artistic production, but with a view toward internationalisms and the possibility of new internationalisms—a reexamining of the global, in part through a look at the reinscription of the national and international in the global context, which may also be taken as a push toward local specificities in relation to the global. This is also producing developing practices of global responsibility, including socially engaged and environmentally conscious forms of art practice that point to a planetary ethics of the visual. Thus, participants will cover topics from the national to the global and the planetary, from a history of Asian American and other diasporic Asian art to current global tendencies. Global Asias | Art will engage scholars, arts professionals and artists with a critical look at the field in response to the concept of Global Asias including the conceptual intentionality, possibility and limits of these frameworks.

This symposium, organized by the University of Tokyo’s Integrated Human Sciences for Cultural Diversity Program, aims to interrogate the notion of Global Asias and the contemporary situation of Asian art in and beyond geographical Asia.

The idea of Global Asias, which refers to the global dislocation, relocation, and transformation of goods, ideas, and people originating in Asia, calls attention to transnational conflict and negotiation at multiple intersecting levels. It is concerned with relationships not only between indigenous cultures inside Asia, but also between Asian-derived cultures outside of Asia. Global Asias looks, for example, not only at the relationship between Japan and the United States or Japan and Brazil, but also the relationship between Japanese-American and Japanese-Brazilian.

The symposium proposes to focus specifically on contemporary art practices in relationship to the global diffusion and transformation of Asian art and culture. We would like to explore how local art history in Asian countries is reconfigured by, and also reconfigures, the globalization of Asian art and its discourses. We are also interested in examining how art practices within a given country relate to art practices by those who are from that country but live and work elsewhere.

In addition, we would like to consider how the idea of Global Asias, which represents a plural and transnational concept of Asian culture, figures in the processes of globalization that in some way exercise hegemonic effects on local and indigenous art practices. The symposium will also consider global framings in relation to the concept of Global Asias which may include a call back to the international or may examine practices that call upon the global in terms of the planetary.